Tina Packer had directed or acted in two-thirds of Shakespeare's more than 35 plays when she started to notice something. The older Will got, the more he got women.

It sparked an idea in Packer, founding artistic director of Shakespeare and Company in Lenox, Mass. Five years of working on that idea has led her to premiere the current version of "Women of Will" at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, beginning Thursday.

"Women of Will" is actually five stand-alone plays, varying in length from 90 minutes to two and a half hours. Each features Packer and Nigel Gore onstage enacting several characters from Shakespeare's canon of plays.

CSF will stage each of the five parts of "Women of Will" three times between Thursday and Aug. 12. One of those performances will take place during a marathon weekend -- Aug. 10-12 -- in which audiences can see each of them in succession Friday through Sunday if they wish.

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Packer said the cycle reveals Shakespeare's growth as a writer.

"What it does is it follows Shakespeare's writing life, more or less in the chronological order in which he wrote the plays," she said. "You actually can see Shakespeare's own enlightenment journey through the way he wrote the women."

Packer said Shakespeare tended to project some kind of male notion of women onto his female characters in his earliest plays, including the "Henry" history plays, and early comedies like "Love's Labor's Lost" and "The Comedy of Errors." The women in those plays populate "Women of Will, Part I," the piece that opens Thursday.

"They're either shrews who have to be tamed or virgins on a pedestal," she said.

A few years later, when Shakespeare penned "Romeo and Juliet," he created a young man and woman who were equals. Other examples Packer draws upon in the second part include the gender-equal pairings in "Much Ado About Nothing" and "Antony and Cleopatra."

"I think something happened to Shakespeare, like he fell violently in love, but he suddenly starts writing some insight of women, not just about them -- he starts embodying them," Packer said. "What you get is suddenly men and women are equal, which changes everything. Then they really can have a true sexual relationship. If their relationship is profound enough it can be a spiritual merging too. That shifts the whole power structure."

The word "will" in the cycle's title has three meanings: It refers, of course, to the playwright, and to the female characters' personal wills. But also, Packer said, the word would have had sexual connotations in the Elizabethan world.

Shakespeare's playful habit of writing women who disguise themselves as men in order to make their way in the man's world is covered in Part III of the cycle. Part III gets at how women had to disguise their voices, their true selves, or else face dire consequences.

"Then we go to the late plays where we actually all have to follow the feminine spirit to stop this killing machine," Packer said of the final part of the cycle.

While much of the "Women of Will" plays is made up of scenes and monologues from Shakespeare's plays, that's not all there is. Each of the five parts includes banter between Packer and Gore about what's happening in the plays, and commentary about Shakespeare's evolving view of women.

"Half of it is talking and half of it is doing scenes," Packer said. "But it is a play, it's not a lecture."

Gore and Packer even argue about the substance of the plays.

"The phrase 'you're talking bollocks' does enter into the fray at times," Gore said.

After the production closes in Boulder, the pair will perform in the Czech Republic at the Prague Shakespeare Festival later this year. A run in New York is planned for January. In addition, Packer is turning the project into a book, which is scheduled to be published next year.

Packer, who also directed CSF's current production of "Richard III" (which stars Gore in the title role), has directed nearly each of Shakespeare's plays during her career. She didn't set out to create a cycle of plays about Shakespeare's evolving view of women. But the idea sprang from working on his plays for several years.

"I was about two-thirds of the way through the canon when I started realizing what the role of the women characters played. And I suddenly got their trajectory," she said. "I wasn't particularly looking for it, but it was because I immersed myself in them.

"Directing the plays or acting them is very different from reading them. You're living in the world of the play and I started getting how the women changed, and that actually they matured, and how he wrote about them changed."

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